


The words we keep, like laurel leaves, underneath our tongues

by Etalice



Series: Drarryland 2019 [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Atrocious singing, Depression, Drarryland: A Drarry Game/Fest, Gen, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Hopeful Ending, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-08 07:18:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17976842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etalice/pseuds/Etalice
Summary: Later, Minerva will find them both sound asleep, leaning on either side of the door. And she’ll know better than to wake them up, she will, but she’ll think that they’ve both been lost for so long, and she’ll hope that by finding each other, they’ll eventually find themselves again, so she’ll retreat softly and let their slow, steady, heavy breaths, through the wood, mingle into each other.In which Draco's filled with shame and guilt, Harry takes to practising his quite frankly awful singing in the middle of the night, and they find each other somehow in the hours between dusk and dawn.





	The words we keep, like laurel leaves, underneath our tongues

**Author's Note:**

> _Prompt : A new nextdoor neighbor/roommate keeps singing very badly at all hours of the night. Must include the word "earsplitting" - Minimum: 450 words - Maximum: 1150 words._
> 
> So many thanks to [Orpheus87](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orpheous87/pseuds/orpheous87) for betaing this.

Coming back to Hogwarts for an eighth year was a terrible idea.

The whole of the school is a panic attack just waiting to happen, each corridor and stair and wall still smells like war and death, making guilt crawl like beetles under Draco’s skin. He figures it’ll get easier at first — that he’ll find a way to shed his skin and become a brand new creature, alive and unsullied. He’s mistaken, he learns, as shame continues to hang heavy and fragile in his chest like pungent rotten fruit.

He’s mistaken, and it doesn’t get easier, and then, the singing starts.

To tell the truth, _singing_ is not the word that pops into Draco’s head when he first hears it (he’d been staring at the ceiling well past midnight, trying to untangle the knots in his stomach or forget about the entire concept of his existence, or do anything at all that’ll just let him sleep). An earsplitting screech, not entirely unlike the death throes of a thestral, that sends Draco into fits of cold fear before he remembers how to separate the past from the present (but there was a werewolf between these walls, and he watched his classmates fall on these grounds). By the time Draco’s lungs agree to breathe again, the awful noise has changed and Draco thinks he recognises a few notes of an old Celestina Warbeck hit, as it might sound if it were sung by a grindylow, underwater. And Draco — Draco ought to be enraged about it, really, because it’s the middle of the night, because he should be asleep, because not even Warbeck’s most mainstream songs deserve this sort of butchering, and he ought to knock on that door, demand that silence be restored this instant.

But he’s not, and so he won’t.

Because in the next room is Harry Potter, saviour of the wizarding world, and because he’s Draco Malfoy, who trembled and cried throughout the war and whose arm is forever marked in black.

(Because there was a werewolf between these walls, and he watched his classmates fall on these grounds, and it was all his fault.)

And so, night after night, shrieks and squawks and moans trickle through the stone wall and flood Draco’s room. Draco’s almost relieved, to tell the truth, that he has a tangible reason to the dark circles underneath his eyes now — not that anyone would ask, really, because everyone’s back in their own dorms, in their own houses, in their old selves and fault lines started appearing between him and the rest of the world when he realised he alone had been granted a single room (he, and Potter, admittedly, but he tries not to think of that.) And Draco learns to rely on those indescribable noises Potter makes, to let them surround his head, and dispel his thoughts, and ease the loneliness that crushes his heart every second he’s awake.

It could go on, this strange nighttime arrangement. It could go on with Potter sounding like a kneazle caterwauling in the owlery, and with Draco not whispering a word of it to anyone, but it doesn’t and this is how it happens :

It’s seven past four and the room’s been silent since Draco turned off the wireless before bed. Draco is awake, of course, his veins caught fire with the memories of all his mistakes at some point just before midnight. and his pillow got all tear-stained in the aftermath, and his hands are still trembling with the intensity of everything when the familiar sounds spill through the wall. Only, they’re not familiar at all, they sound like crying and screaming and Draco’s chest feels like it’s been hit with a glacius charm. He doesn’t know what to do at all, Draco. He’s used to being the quiet ghost at this point, listening from the shadows and hidden from sight behind walls but he knows those sounds, he knows those cries because they came from his throat once and every single one of his bones screams with the need to do — something.

So he gets out of bed, and treads (quietly, quietly, quietly) across his room and over the doorstep until he’s standing in front of Potter’s room. Broken sobs spill through every crack in the door, and Draco — knocks (terrified and awestruck, holding his breath at the sacrilege of his fingers against the wood.)

“Potter”, Draco whispers, his cheek against door and his heart in his throat.

The sobbing stops and an eerie, vibrating kind of silence settles between them.

“Potter”, Draco whispers again, when no answer comes but really, what else can he say? It’s not like he has any lessons to give, any hope to spare. He feels ridiculous all of a sudden, empty and cold and entirely out of place. “I’m sorry,” he whispers all the same although he’s not sure what he’s sorry for (for letting the werewolf in, and for the ink upon his arm, and for the holes the war left in everyone’s chest.)

“You understand,” comes a voice, broken and rough, on the other side of the door. “No one knows what he was like, Voldemort, what it was like in his head. But you know. You know — you understand.”

And he does, oh he does, so he plasters his face and hands against the door and again, softly, softly, say he’s sorry.

Potter talks about what it was like, being in Voldemort’s head, in a low voice that vibrates with pain and anger at once. Draco tells him about the fear that clings to his skin, and how it felt watching everything fall apart and not being brave enough to do anything. Each on opposite sides of the door, shoulders and faces and hands pressed against the woods, breaths and sobs seeping through the cracks, they talk, and talk, and talk until their chests don’t feel quite so heavy anymore, until the marcescent leaves and the rotten fruit have fallen to the ground and they can feel the first buds of spring bursting behind their ribs (cool, and crisp, and entirely new).

“I’m glad you’re here, Malfoy.” Potter finally says as dawn brushes its gold fingers against the wall and a heavy, sated kind of silence descends upon them.

“I’m here. I’m here. I promise”, Draco mumbles, his eyelids growing heavy as his limbs fall to his side, sand-filled and warm.

Later, Minerva will find them both sound asleep, leaning on either side of the door. And she’ll know better than to wake them up, she will, but she’ll think that they’ve both been lost for so long, and she’ll hope that by finding each other, they’ll eventually find themselves again, so she’ll retreat softly and let their slow, steady, heavy breaths, through the wood, mingle into each other.


End file.
